The present invention relates generally to broadband and wireless communications and more particularly to a method and system for accountable resource allocation ARA in cellular and broadband wireless networks.
Mobile virtual network operators MVNOs are emerging as strong players in the mobile network market to provide enhanced services such as video telephony, live streaming and interactive games (along with traditional voice services) to focused customers. This model is arguably a win-win situation for both MVNOs and mobile network operators MNOs, since MVNOs help MNOs attract and retain a greater number of customers. For MNOs and MVNOs, customizability fosters greater innovation in flow management and other services to achieve differentiation from their competitors (100 and 102). For controlled evaluation of innovations (101), greater customizability would enable deploying and testing new solutions without recompiling or rebooting the basestations. In addition, most basestation manufacturers restrict access to the basestations they provide to the MNOs. Customization would provide MNOs with more access to the flow management with little modification to the basestation. The MNOs can pass this functionality to the different MVNOs it hosts.
As revenue from voice services is decreasing rapidly, data services are receiving increased focus from WiMAX, 3G and LTE network operators. Already, more sophisticated data plans for revenue generation on 3G networks have emerged, and are constantly evolving. Many of these sophisticated data plans include corporate bundle plans where the bandwidth can be shared across a group of employees of a corporation. The management policies of flows/group of flows for a corporation or an enterprise have unique requirements. A network with customized flow management would be an ideal fit for enterprises offering wireless services to its employees. Further, corporate intranets can be made accessible to users “everywhere” through complete virtualization of the network resources (101).
The goal of the global environment for network innovations GENI is to enable a general virtualized environment for supporting experimentation and prototype deployments for studying innovative technologies in large-scale real life scenarios (101). This has not been possible in the past since mobile network operator MNO equipment has been closed for experimentation. Customization can help MNOs to provide a way to deploy and test innovative ideas, while running operational networks. This provides a win-win situation for both network providers and researchers.
Varying channel quality between a user and a base station in cellular and broadband wireless access networks leads to varying channel resource usage per Kbps user throughput. This can adversely affect the overall base station throughput and fairness across users. While users induce some variations, some variations are induced by network deployment. However, no accountability exists in current cellular and broadband wireless networks, leading to a bias during resource allocation towards either network operators or users, thereby hurting the other party.
While several channel-aware research proposals and scheduler implementations do consider variations in channel quality perceived by users, they do so only for exploiting multi-user channel diversity. They do not consider the variations from each user's historical perspective, and hence, do not incorporate accountability to the right extent. Lack of accountability in wireless resource management results in inefficient use of wireless resources, and unfairly penalizes either the network operators or the users.
Accordingly, there is a need for an accountable resource allocation in wireless and broadband networks that is objectively fair to both users and network operators.